The aim of this study was to analyze the development of Perceptual Inhibition (PI) and Selective Visual Attention (SVA) across lifespan, identifying key moments of change in the direction of development. A total of 810 Argentinian participants, ranging from 6-80 years, were included. The results revealed that PI and SVA followed similar patterns,…

A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in…

In this study, we examined imitation performance, visual attention, and the relationship between imitation and visual attention of children with autism, developmental delay (DD), and typically developing (TD) children. The study findings revealed that children with autism and DD imitated less than TD children in all imitation tasks. Results also…

Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

One factor that may influence how executive functions develop is exposure to more than one language in childhood. This study explored the impact of bilingualism on inhibitory control in autistic (n = 38) and non-autistic children (n = 51). Bilingualism was measured on a continuum of exposure to investigate the effects of language environment on…

Visual information is crucial for postural control. Visual processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was hypothesized to be less efficient and thus they would display a less stable standing posture than typically developing children. The present study compared the static standing responses and attentional demands of 15 children…

Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of…

The multiple object tracking (MOT) paradigm has proven its value in targeting a number of aspects of visual cognition. This study used MOT to investigate the effect of object-based grouping, both in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A modified MOT task was administered to both groups, who had to track and distinguish four…

Attention is an important, multifaceted cognitive domain that includes many key cognitive processes involved in learning. This study aimed to identify the predictive links between different components of attentional skills and core calculation skills development, using two standardized measures assessing calculation (AC-MT 6-11) and attention…

This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to…

The findings are evidence that persons with ASD benefit more than typically developing (TD) persons from spatial framing cues in focusing their attention on a visual target. Participants were administered a forced-choice task to assess visual filtering. A target stimulus was presented on a screen and flanker stimuli were presented simultaneously…

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between selective visual attention (SVA), reading decoding, listening comprehension and reading comprehension in children with and without a reading disorder. Methods: We used longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. We split children into four…

The ability to disengage attention and reengage elsewhere has been proposed as a fundamental deficit in the autism spectrum, potentially disrupting development of higher cognitive domains. Eye-movements were recorded while 16 autism spectrum children of mixed ability, and 18 typically developing age-matched controls, completed the Gap-Overlap…

Presentation of two kinds of materials in working memory (visual and acoustic), with the requirement to attend to one or both modalities, poses an interesting case for working memory development because competing predictions can be formulated. In two experiments, we assessed such predictions with children 7-13 years old and adults. With…